Rachel Spronk

Rachel Spronk (1973) obtained her Master’s degree (with distinction) in Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam in 1999. Her MA thesis, entitled Aids, a disease of modernity. Adolescent narratives about Aids in middle class Nairobi dealt with the interpretation of Aids among adolescents, whose narrations reveal social and personal discontent and ambivalences. 

She obtained her PhD (with distinction) at the Amsterdam School for Social-sciences (ASSR), also at the University of Amsterdam. In her dissertation entitled ‘Ambiguous pleasures. Sexuality and new self-definitions in Nairobi’ she analyses sexuality as a prism to explore how sexuality is constituted socially and experienced personally. By focussing on public debates (preoccupied with issues of African heritage, gerontocratic power relations and conventional morality) on the one hand, and personal sexual relationships on the other, she explores how sex has become central to self-expression and how sexuality has gained new meanings in contemporary lifestyles. The focus is on young professionals and how they embody postcolonial transformations and how, in their ensuing lifestyles, constructions of sexuality, gender and morality come to shift, hence engendering new modes of being.      

Currently she holds a part-time postdoc position at the Amsterdam School for Social-sciences (ASSR) in a research entitled ‘Promoting access to and use of Voluntary Counselling and Testing and Antiretroviral Therapy among people living with AIDS in Ghana’. She also works part-time as a lecturer at the Sociology/Anthropology Department and teaches sexuality studies at the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences (ISHSS). She is the coordinator of the MA programme ‘Gender, Sexuality and Society’ of at the ISHSS, all at the University of Amsterdam.

Rachel Spronk is also co-editor of Etnofoor, a Dutch journal of anthropology.

http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/r.spronk/